Department of Community Affairs Official Admits Failings

SEBRING - Forty percent of Florida's greenhouse gases come from tailpipes.

So cities, counties and the state need to plan better, says Charles Gauthier, director of community planning for the Department of Community Affairs.

"Is there a way we can work with rural land stewardship to get people out of their cars?" asked Gauthier, who spoke Tuesday at the statewide Rural Tourism & Economic Development Summit in Sebring.

People keep coming to Florida, Gauthier said, so the need to manage the demand for travel continues too.

Other Side

But instead of more responsiveness, expect less from DCA, Gauthier told the crowd of 75 people at Four Points Sheraton, who included economic developers, local planners and home builders. Budget cuts demanded by the Legislature will reduce 20 percent of the workforce for the DCA, Florida's planning agency.

"People seem to think DCA is a big growth management agency," said Gauthier, who was a last-minute replacement for Secretary Tom Pelham. "The reality is that we have 69 positions, 40 planners who work with every comprehensive amendment in the state. We will lose eight full-time planners and nine part-timers. That's going to impact what we can do."

That's not good news to city and county planners, who have been complaining that DCA is already slow and unresponsive. It took three years to get dozens of local comprehensive plan amendments through DCA. Those amendments finally allowed Avon Park's Wal-Mart to begin, but weren't in time to build a Wal-Mart distribution center between Sebring and Lake Placid, according to the president of Latt Maxcy Group in Tampa, who claimed he lost the deal because of DCA's ponderous methodology.

Gauthier admitted as much.

"Transportation concurrency, it's become the bane of our existence," he said. Concurrency is a law that requires schools, water systems, roads and other infrastructure to be built along with subdivisions. If infrastructure isn't there already, the governments have to prove it has the funds to build it. If a developer wants to get in front of governments and build subdivisions where no infrastructure exists, the developer must pay what's called a proportionate share.

Gauthier said transportation concurrency "is unpredictable, it's inequitable many times when there's a deficient road segment, and if you're the next developer and you're paying a proportionate share, the prices can be astounding. We worked with one in Pasco County and the roadway mitigation was $550 million.

"So in lieu of the current transportation concurrency approach, which is sort of a bean-counting, project by project, we're much more interested in the mobility approach, that would be an equitable, across the board, funding approach," Gauthier said.

"Developers would pay their share based on their impact, based on vehicle miles traveled. So that if a development is out in the boondocks, if it's a single use that doesn't generate a lot of traffic, well, they're going to pay more, under that methodology. If the development is in town, mixed use, with a good trip capture..."

Planning Bill of Rights

DCA tried to get a Citizens Planning Bill of Rights passed in the 2008 legislative session, which ended
last week.

"We went into the session with an ambitious agenda," Gauthier said. "We feel we needed a stronger citizen role." That's a concept advocated by Florida Hometown Democracy, which wants citizens to vote on all planning changes.

DCA wanted neighborhood meetings for future land use map amendments. "A little more discipline in the amendment process," Gauthier said, "so there would be one major and one secondary cycle for economic and affordable housing infill. And we'd have a cooling off period before final hearings. All those ideas wound up failing."

But, he said, the ideas may come back in the next legislative session.

Highlands is among counties that received $100,000 for updates to its plans. But DCA wasn't able to provide all the money it wanted to. The recessionary economy has put the state in a financial bind.

"We're going to do what we can for rural areas," Gauthier promised. "But unfortunately the money has dried up."

He closed his 20-minute speech with an odd request.

"Think of the DCA as your friend," Gauthier said, and the audience chuckled loudly. Economic developers, local planners and builders have a love-hate relationship with the state agency.